#and when I TALK i end up going idhar udhar and often lose the track of my thoughts

[badedramay]

so. since you’re revisiting, a diyar-e-dil question. i started rewatching a lot of old dramas i used to love recently and while i can acknowledge many of these are products of their time and emblematic of certain societal ideals i also feel like the harm of those ideals is sometimes so hard to ignore. like in rewatching diyar-e-dil i’ll go to the youtube comments and so many people have nothing but disdain for ruhi when all i can feel rewatching as an adult is immense sympathy for her. i know the point of the drama as a whole is to overcome differences and prejudice and to mend old wounds, and there is of course a valid concern in how ruhi imposes her own anger and hatred onto faarah to the point of suffocation. but i don’t know how people don’t sympathize with ruhi for the reasons she’s angry in the first place. if i were a mother and my husband told me to get my daughter married to her cousin out of a need to mend old wounds i would be infuriated. i would feel terrified for my daughter and for her ability to make her own choices. and it feels like the degree to which ruhi and faarah are stripped of agency for the sake of perpetuating the whole narrative is almost absurd, like they have to go along with everything and wait for it all to fall into place bc that’s the only way the message of familial unity will get across (and i know faarah doesn’t give in literally speaking, she’s obv quite defiant, but i’m referring more to the wait-and-see narrative approach that our dramas are so often fond of to make a girl come around to a guy she’s forcefully married to). of course wali ends up being the better love interest in the end even though he utterly manhandles her in the beginning bc she “belongs” to him. of course ruhi was just wrong and judgmental of the family the whole time and not reacting to a fear of feudalist tradition and supremacy. of course faarah’s mamoozaad cousin was conveniently evil and psychotic the whole time. it all feels way too convenient. and i know there has to be some suspension of disbelief to successfully engage with these stories but i don’t know how capable i am of it anymore when it seems so many harmful stereotypes and mindsets are perpetuated through our dramas and continue to be, and they overwhelmingly treat people who are apprehensive of the harms of certain traditions like judgmental aliens who simply have to meet the right family to come around. it feels like a very naive approach to addressing those apprehensions and the societal concerns at the root of them

in any case, i know you love diyar-e-dil a lot, so if any of this upsets you feel free to delete the ask entirely. but (to finally ask my question lol) i was wondering, did any of these little details ever catch your eye or bother you too with respect to what we allow dramas to subtly perpetuate on a societal level? i feel like people’s engagement with these topics and to this level of depth is quite low on pak drama twt, but i’ve enjoyed your deeper analysis so i figured i’d take a chance and ask for your insight. hope none of this comes off as judgmental of you or your tastes bc i definitely don’t intend it to be! for all of my qualms with the drama now i am still fond of it in certain aspects, just not so much in others anymore

*rubs hand in glee*

first off, thank you for sending in this long and insightful ask. just to be clear i am not the least bit upset or offended by it cuz whatever you said IS a valid point. tbh, the reason why i want to revisit Diyar e Dil is because I want to watch it and see how I *now* feel about it. nostalgia paints a pretty picture and while I am sure no amount of years will lessen my love for this drama, my reason for revisiting is to see what more I can add to the commentary that I have already made (and i have made a LOT of it) about the drama and its narrative themes. have my tastes changed? how forgiving or not am I now about the things show in the drama vs when I first watched it in 2015 or when I rewatched it in 2018? i know i have changed..but how much has Diyar e Dil changed in the years? these are important questions and I believe asking them is only fair and legitimate. bhayee jo baat hai..how long can we continue to recommend dramas as "best that the industry has to offer" but with a disclaimer "yeah ignore some of the obvious flaws of it though". Diyar e Dil for so long has been my no-brainer drama to recommend to people looking for quality scripts..it's only fair if I put it to test.

therefore fair warning: i am answering this based on my previous knowledge of the show which might be lacking cuz time works in a funny way to the memory xD

warning 2: it's long.

Ruhi was, in its truest essence, a grey character. up until the point when Behroze takes Ruhi to meet Aga Jaan after he makes the choice of choosing his love over his family, Ruhi had all my support. she wasn't a bad person; despite her fears she encouraged her husband to reconnect with his family. even until Behroze makes his decision of getting Faraa married to Wali, I could sympathize with Ruhi. where she fully loses me is how Ruhi treats Faraa after all that. the years long emotional abuse she subjects Faraa to..that's where she crosses a line of no coming back. the thing with Ruhi is that makes it easy for the YT audience to make her the subject of their disdain is how hypocritical Ruhi was when it came to her family vs Behroze's. Ruhi went above and beyond to keep her family close and in love with her. I get why she did it, the fear of abandonment had her clinging on to them for dear life. Where Behroze also lost her is how she simply refused to extend that courtesy towards Behroze's family. She had such a trigger happy response ready whenever Behroze mentioned his father that it baffled Behroze. Had he not been a good husband to Ruhi? Had he not been a good son-in-law for her family? Had he not loved and supported her and her family in whatever capacity he could? Behroze's obligation was only towards Ruhi but he accepted that Ruhi's family came around in their toughest times so he accepted them as his own. But that doesn't erase that his family DOES exist. That for years his brother had been trying to build the bridge between him and their father. That it was Behroze's own zidd that made him lose time in which he could've made more peaceful amends. Behroze was troubled, he was emotionally and mentally disturbed; the first person he expected to give him support no questions asked was the first person to abandon him. And Ruhi CONTINUED to abandon Behroze for years by not caring for Faraa; by not even trying to muster up the manners to have a kind conversation with her father-in-law. Ruhi and Behroze were both abandoned by their family. In both cases the families did eventually come around. if Ruhi was willing to forgive her own family for it, why not for Behroze's? Specially when Behroze reconnected with his family by getting the worst possible news he could. Ruhi's flaw that pushes her in the darker of the grey category is her victim complex. And the narrative does call her out on it. That in the list of people who made mistakes, Ruhi is not excluded from it. A lot of Ruhi's anger and fears are justified but SO MUCH of her actions aren't.

so many harmful stereotypes and mindsets are perpetuated through our dramas and continue to be, and they overwhelmingly treat people who are apprehensive of the harms of certain traditions like judgmental aliens who simply have to meet the right family to come around. it feels like a very naive approach to addressing those apprehensions and the societal concerns at the root of them

Fair point but it doesn't really apply in the case of this show, does it? Ruhi spent her life with a man who belonged to the same society and family whose supposed evil traditions she wanted to "protect" her daughter from? if Behroze turned out to be a decent man, by sheer law of probability his family could also be decent. No. this show only chooses the veil of being apprehensive towards the norm of a certain society to show how a person uses certain stereotypes and prejudices to conveniently stay in their own bubble where they feel safe. as far as themes go, Diyar e Dil was never meant to address these socio-cultural concerns. sure, they were an important plot device but the plot itself was not fully reliant on them. if anything, DeD ended up showing a positive side of the often criticized segment of the society by reiterating that a person's inner goodness or evilness is not defined by which socio-cultural background they belong to.it never made any sweeping statements about how ALL families in ALL over the world are ALL like this. no. it showed a story of this ONE family only with all the mistakes it made and how it worked to rectify them and left it to the audience to learn something from it if they liked it enough.

One of the big takeaways from the show is to judge people by their individual merits, to ponder over their actions not in isolation but within the context of their situation, because that's how one truly knows a person and until you don't know a person..how can you love or hate them? (that's what Faraa confesses no? that how could she hate Wali when she didn't even know him? she always only knew the version of him that was fed to her by people who ALSO didn't know him)

I am someone who was always fond of the story of Diyar e Dil. It's one of my favorite comfort reads by Farhat Ishtiaq. When it was announced that DeD was going to be adapted to screen, i was scared. not always does a book to screen adaptation does the story justice. however, DeD onscreen didn't disappoint. not only the script for TV added more layers and dimensions to the characters and situations, the STORY at its core remained intact. DeD was written always to give the lesson of how ego rots relationships. that while ego can give a temporary satisfaction it's the bonds that tie us which are our salvation. and to make bonds is to abandon the ego. Aga Jaan, Behroze, Ruhi, to an extent Faraa..it was their ego that made them stand on the precipice of disaster. Behroze lost his chance. AJ learned his lessons but not until he faced immense tragedy did he fully embrace it. Ruhi had to fall from the cliff into the mouth of tragedy to learn the lesson but she got rescued midway. And Faraa was lucky enough to learn it while she had the time and she stepped away from danger. I see DeD as a story like this. Hence, the flaws that it has become not wholly ignorable but they lose their ability to overpower the heart this story has. and the story has its heart in the right place.

maybe I am the odd one out here but I judge a drama (desi dramas more specifically) based on what it intends to be and how it presents those intentions. everything else is secondary. convince me on the intention and convince me that the methods chosen to present that intention are in tandem with each other and be very CLEAR about them - you'd have my attention. this works across all genres for me. I lose my interest when i see discrepancies in the intention and the presentation. which is why I have dropped shows after being hyped about them to the skies (Tere Bin/Pyari Mona) and which is why I have gotten back on board on shows that previously lost me (Yunhi). Diyar e Dil had the intention and presentation decided right from the beginning and it very clearly stayed on the path. did it have to rely on some plot conveniences? of course it did, it had no other choice (like for the longest time I was a staunch Moiz supporter and only until he fully showed his ugliness did i start to hate him...his villanness which seems obvious now in hindsight broke my heart {despite also knowing Moiz was a bad guy in the novel as well like wow ajeeb dimag chalta tha tab mera dkjaehakjsdhawea} but it was necessary for the plot so contrived it might be..i accepted it) would i like to change things about it? sure! which drama is so wholly satisfying that it leaves the audience with no ground to transform it? it's just that there's something so fulfilling about this story and how it's told that I keep coming back to it again and again even if its to say the same praises and air the same grievances again and again.